The independent ombudsman at DNS overseer ICANN has used his last day on the job to fire a broadside over the ".gay" top-level domain.
In a ruling published on his own website, Chris LaHatte argues that the organization's board should reject a recommendation by its own governance committee (BGC) and should grant special …

@kain

Re: @kain

Any thing that offends christian fundies is considered porn in the US. In the US we have people freaking out over the fact that the can not discriminate based on religiousness reasons. This has cause some states to institute religious freedom laws. Mississippi went so far as to say therapist can refuse clients based on religious reasons.

I don't know you that I was saying this based on my religious views ?

My religious views forbids me from shoving my region down others.

The reason why I said what I said is just look at the republican platform is.

"the ICANN board is not obliged to follow its governance committee's recommendations"

I only read this article...

because I'm .gay curious. Or is that .bi? What about .lgbtq? Or should sexual preference / gender identity on the net reflect societal aims and be no more worthy of comment / distinction than which tennis player you follow or what flavour yoghurt you like? In fact, I demand .vanillayoghurt be a top level domain specifically for us vanilla yoghurt lovers.

Re: I only read this article...

I was wondering where this so-called gay community is. Being gay simply means a person has something in common with another person who is gay. That's pretty much the end of it. What about the "community" of every other possible commonality between large and otherwise disparate groupings of people?

Re: I only read this article...

Shame to see you being modded down for what is an accurate comment. Probably about one in a hundred people is homosexual. No one group, no matter how vocal in the media, represents all those people. Or even, quite frankly, a majority of them. As you say, sexual orientation is an arbitrary thing. Why should a small affiliation of advocacy groups get to control who can and cannot register a domain under .gay. If another gay person wants to register a name, why does a group get to declare they represent him or her and decide on that because they happen to share a particular biological quirk together? And what if someone who isn't gay wants to register a domain under such a name, Why again should their not having a particular sexual orientation mean they're subject to another group's policies on that?

You can make cases for restriction of domain selling based on clearly defined groups and meaning and ICANN does in such scenarios. But being Gay, as you point out, is not like being a registered company or a member of a political party. Nobody gets to tell you they represent you because you both fancy the same sex, nor are there absolute hard boundaries to what lets you count as one orientation or another. The only fair way to handle this is to treat .gay like any other open TLD and allow people to register what they want as they want. Not to hand it over to some non-elected group with an agenda and say "you get to decide for everyone now. All yours." I mean ICANN are a non-elected group but at least they have had some reasonable strictures and pressures applied to them during their tenure.

What is being asked here is wrong on principle, and it's a shame to see you get voted down for pointing out that sexual orientation is an arbitrary thing that doesn't define who you are or give others the right to decide things for you.

>How is one not gay enough ?

You took el reg's click-bait as ICANN's reasoning.

If I read it correctly, "not gay enough" means dotgay LLC don't have enough support within the homosexual community, and "too gay" means dotgay LLC claims to represent interests well outside the homosexual community.

Pretty much meaning, that dotgay LLC is going for "anything but straight" which ICANN says isn't what the word "gay" means. Does gay mean "transsexual"? Not really. Does gay mean "bisexual"? Only half the time. Does "gay" mean "transvestite"? No.

And what is the point of TLDs? Really its to create namespace. I suppose "rainbow-warrior" might be different depending on the TLD, but I'm not sure a sexual proclivity warrants a TLD. A world of weirdness lies down that path and I'm not convinced it adds much in the way of namespace. .edu and .mil don't add much but they are historical artefacts from the origins of the internet. Country names do add a lot of namespace, .com and .org add a lot of namespace. I don't think .gay is likely to add much - I don't think having it will release or prevent the uptake of many otherwise ambiguous domains from other namespaces. That is the point of a TLD, is it not? Perhaps it isn't. Perhaps its just to allow companies to profit and ICANN is just trying to apply some logic in sorting out the registration between squabbling commercial entities who want profit from owning .gay.

But transgender/intersex isn't gay. Gay is a type of sexual attraction, transgender/intersex are a type of sexual identity.

Yes, you could have somebody who is both gay and transgender (a man trapped in a woman's body who is attracted to other men), but that just clearly demonstrates that they are measurements on two completely different scales.

I'm just asking....

...but why?

Why do people feel they need tld for a type of sexual attraction? I don't give a stuff if people are straight, bi or gay, but I just don't see the point, other than being yet another cash cow, of this domain.

Re: I'm just asking....

Because we are, in a real sense, permanent outsiders even in best-case scenarios.

Think of it this way: Ex-pats will often seek other ex-pats even if they absolutely adore their host country. It's not wrong of them to want to do this from time to time. Also, native-born people shouldn't feel offended or rejected.